"Heat" - A Great NYC Movie (Sorta)

Recently I was happy to find that one of my favorite movies from the 1990s, director Michael Mann's great crime epic Heat, was available on Netflix. I hadn't seen it in years but was surprised that it not only holds up but is better than ever. It's easily one of the greatest cops-and-robbers movies ever made. 

But the movie is about so much more than the story of master thieves and the police who chase them: it's about relationships -- between men and women, friends and lovers, but, most of all, people who work together.

Heat is ultimately a movie about work -- about how it makes us who we are, about how it changes the course of our lives, about how our work is both our pride and our tragedy. In this case, the work is crime and fighting crime, and how they play off each other and ultimately merge. Heat is really a tale of existential angst in the guise of a crime drama.

If you've never seen Heat -- do it now. It's nearly three hours long and has a complex plot but you can follow it if you pay attention. It's so visually stunning, so beautiful in its imagery and music, so thrilling with its action sequences (it has arguably the best shoot out ever captured on film), that you become hypnotized. Then, of course, there's the once in a lifetime cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Ted Levine, Natalie Portman, Tim Sizemore, and many more giving haunting, intense performances. Heat is a masterpiece, an action movie for smart people, a totally American movie with a very European feel. It's a miracle that it was ever made and you don't really see movies like it today.

I especially love the beginning, when you see a train pulling into a steamy nighttime station, and De Niro exits, a man on a mission that we don't know about yet. (Everything about it sets the solitary, melancholy tone of this film.) You see him descend from the station and walk into a hospital, you hear the beeping of machines, the clinking of tubes and the rolling of gurneys, voices in the background, and he gets into an ambulance and drives off. He's alone, always alone, and from there the story begins. Throughout the movie there are moments like these where -- between the action, between the confrontations, between the plot -- we get moments of contemplation, moments of being alone with the characters, moments where we get to reflect on the story, the characters, their dilemmas, and our own feelings about them. When so many other movies play down to our intelligence, Heat goes the other way -- it forces us to think, to feel, to ponder, to care. The movie gets under your skin, into your soul, in a way that few ever do.

The backdrop for this movie, for this web of complex personal and working relationships, is Los Angeles. Heat is about a city as much as it's about people -- about how this vast place contains and causes lives and relationships both to thrive and die. It's not enough to say that Los Angeles is a "character" in this film -- Los Angeles is this film. Heat and LA, like their cops the robbers, need each other, meshing into a complex whole.

There have, of course, been countless crime movies made about NYC but never one quite like this.

And yet, in a way, Heat is a New York movie: it's two main stars, De Niro and Pacino, are New Yorkers, and their distinct New York sensibilities, their quick wits, their no-nonsense attitudes, their senses of humor, their toughness, exude throughout the film. The characters they play -- De Niro's thief and Pacino's cop -- are, like the actors themselves, men displaced, men away from home, men searching their ways through a wild, vast, mysterious place. Being a New Yorker isn't just about living in this city -- it's about being an explorer, a person on the move, a person going after something. One of Pacino's lines in the movie is, "All I am is what I'm going after." What's more New York than that?

When first I saw Heat back in the 1990s, I was away at college, far from NYC. I felt like a man displaced, a stranger in a distant land, finding my way, alone. It felt oddly personal to me. I realized then that you never feel more like a New Yorker than when you're away from it. The city stays inside you wherever you are. And this LA movie, in its various odd ways, feels like another kind of New York story. NYC and LA have always had a weird symbiosis. They're so different -- and yet so similar. In Heat, we learn that cops and robbers need and repel each other at the same time, that friends, lovers, and co-workers desire and detest each other at the same time, that the yin and yang of neediness and loneliness, the desire to be together and to run away, is perennial, forever in tension -- just like LA and NYC. Heat understands the complexity of people and how they relate to each other and their surroundings.

And whether its NYC, LA, or anywhere else, this story of human duality, like the movie itself, will never get old.